The Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami is one of the most compellingly original voices in world literature. Murakami is, in many ways, the shape of 21st-century fiction to come. Using the narrative mechanisms of Hollywood noir, he explores, in a surreal way, the metaphysical anxieties of our age while retaining a mordant grasp of its mass-consumed realities. His fiction belongs to no genre but has the addictive fluency of the best genre fiction .
Murakami was born in Kyoto in 1949 but spent most of his youth in Kobe. His father was the son of a Buddhist priest; his mother was the daughter of an Osaka merchant. Both were teachers of Japanese literature. Since childhood, Murakami has been heavily influenced by Western culture, particularly Western music and literature. He grew up reading everything from the works of American writers such as Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Brautigan, and he is often distinguished from other Japanese writers for his Western influences. Japanese literature often puts emphasis on beautiful language, which can result in stiff, restricted composition, while Murakami's style is relatively free and fluid.Murakami studied drama at Waseda University in Tokyo, where he met his wife, Yoko. His first job was in a record store (which is where one of his main characters, Toru Watanabe from Norwegian Wood, works). Shortly after finishing his studies, Murakami opened the jazz bar in Kokubunji, Tokyo, which he ran from 1974 to 1982. Many of his novels have musical themes and titles referring to a particular song, including Dance, Dance, Dance (from The Dells), Norwegian Wood (after the Beatles' song) and South of the Border, West of the Sun (the first part being the title of a song by Nat King Cole).
- With Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami gives us a novel every bit as ambitious and expansive as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which has been acclaimed both here and around the world for its uncommon ambition and achievement, and whose still-growing popularity suggests that it will be read and admired for decades to come.This magnificent new novel has a similarly extraordinary scope and the same capacity to amaze, entertain, and bewitch the reader. A tour de force of metaphysical reality, it is powered by two remarkable characters: a teenage boy, Kafka Tamura, who runs away from home either to escape a gruesome oedipal prophecy or to search for his long-missing mother and sister; and an aging simpleton called Nakata, who never recovered from a wartime affliction and now is drawn toward Kafka for reasons that, like the most basic activities of daily life, he cannot fathom. Their odyssey, as mysterious to them as it is to us, is enriched throughout by vivid accomplices and mesmerizing events. Cats and people carry on conversations, a ghostlike pimp employs a Hegel-quoting prostitute, a forest harbors soldiers apparently unaged since World War II, and rainstorms of fish (and worse) fall from the sky. There is a brutal murder, with the identity of both victim and perpetrator a riddle , yet this, along with everything else, is eventually answered, just as the entwined destinies of Kafka and Nakata are gradually revealed, with one escaping his fate entirely and the other given a fresh start on his own.Extravagant in its accomplishment, Kafka on the Shore displays one of the world's truly great storytellers at the height of his powers. About Haruki Murakami - Wikipedia Haruki Murakami - Official Website Haruki Murakami - on Randomhouse Everything about the Japanese author
